Small wonders

Jul 8, 2017

Tiny Northern cricket frogs, Acris crepitans, are plentiful and active now along Quarry Gardens trails. America’s smallest vertebrate, this cricket frog may leap up to three feet in a single jump. The featured photo shows one, about half an inch long, posing on the palm of a Quarry Gardens trail hiker. Their patterns vary; many have a green Y-shape on the back and a triangle on the head; this one has black-bordered red-orange spots—cute as a spotted frog. It’s tempting to think of them as “babies” but, of course, baby frogs are tadpoles. If you hear calls that sound like marbles clicking together, you’re hearing cricket frogs.

Tiny and elusive is the Quill fame flower, Phemeranthus teretifolius, pictured above at about twice life size. Related to portulaca, whose leaves it resembles, it grows in thin, dry soils—at the Quarry Gardens, through a patch of asphalt near the Visitor Center, and in a half-inch of gravel on a rock at the overlook platform. Sporadically, a 6-8-inch flower spike produces brilliant half-inch fuchsia blossoms that bloom for about two hours in the afternoon—after which each new flower fades away. So ephemeral are they that not much is known about them. And so elusive of pollinators are they that, lacking them, they self-pollinate.

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Tiny and charming are the slender leafless flower wands of Naked flowered tick trefoil, Hylodesmum nudiflorum, along QGs trails this week. Scattered through the dry woods, they are a native in the pea family. More familiar may be their seeds: those flat little green ​triangles that stick like Velcro to socks and pants legs in late summer. Come and let us send some home with you.